Red Wings' Todd Bertuzzi returns to Vancouver as a grown-up

The Vancouver Sun's Iain MacIntyre spoke to a player whose interactions with the media included glaring stare-downs, brush-offs, sneers, and occasional and mumbled answers during his time with the Vancouver Canucks, and MacIntyre found himself surprised to find out that Todd Bertuzzi, who both plays sound defensive hockey and actually speaks to the media these days, actually contemplated retiring after leaving the Canucks:

October 27, Vancouver Sun: For the first time since he left the Canucks in 2006, stinking from
his toxic relationship with [then-Canucks coach Marc] Crawford and stained permanently by the
attack on [Steve] Moore, Bertuzzi feels at ease again on a team. Like he
belongs. He takes up much less space than he used to, literally
and figuratively. Trimmed down, he goes quietly to work each day for
the Red Wings, impressing his coach and manager and teammates with his
professionalism and commitment to do whatever he is asked.

"I
didn't want to play anymore," Bertuzzi admitted after practising for
tonight's game against the Canucks. "For a while. The trade to Florida
... there have been some weird situations. But I'm quite happy here. I
love playing with this team. For how much longer, I don't know. I'm
having fun this year. I've got to be - it's tough to even say it
- a very defensively responsible player now. They need that from me.
It's something I've had to work on and they've worked hard with me."

As MacIntyre notes, a Bertuzzi pal in former Canucks coach and then-Florida Panthers GM Mike Keenan sent Roberto Luongo to Vancouver for Bertuzzi, who spent the last quarter of the 2006-2007 season with Detroit before heading back to a team that was happy to employ the big, bad bully version of Bertuzzi in Brian Burke's Anaheim Ducks, and Keenan brought Bertuzzi to Calgarly last season, too, but the Red Wings very admittedly wanted a different Bertuzzi--the player who chafed slightly at the suggestion that he leash his fiercely physical play to minimize selfishly-taken penalties and defensive errors during his first stint with the Wings--and, thus far, Red Wings GM Ken Holland says that he likes what he sees from Big But Slightly Less Bad Bert:

"He's doing everything he can to play the system and do the things
our coaching staff wants," Holland said. "He had 15 goals and 44 points
last year and we hope at the end of the year he'll have similar stats. [The
Moore incident] has been a very, very difficult situation for everybody
involved. You certainly feel bad for the Moore family, but you also
feel bad for Todd and his family. It's had a big impact on Todd's
career. But since we've got him here, he's been positive. I think he's
been more comfortable; he's cracking jokes and I think he's happy to be
in Detroit."

Bertuzzi won't let us know how - if at all - he has changed as a
person. He continues to refuse to discuss Steve Moore or offer
introspection. But he has changed as a player. And if he is capable of
evolution on the ice, which seemed doubtful at the end of his eight
years as a Canuck, it stands to reason he has evolved away from it, too. Bertuzzi will be 35 in February, but says he feels old only when he considers that his little girl, Jaden, is now in Grade 6.

"Adversity
builds character and that's true in our case; I throw myself in there,
too," friend and teammate Brad May, who also played a role in the Moore
fiasco, said in the Wings dressing room. "You don't quit, you keep
working, you shift roles."

So much has happened to Bertuzzi since he left Vancouver. Since before he left.

"It seems like a long, long time ago," Bertuzzi admitted. "It seems like it was a dream."

And probably a nightmare, sometimes, but there really are some people who find it much more palatable to wake up to reality in Detroit.

As I've previously stated, Bertuzzi simply cannot speak about Moore because he's facing a legal battle to keep some portion of his career earnings--and Moore's lawyer, Tim Danson, is essentially Johnnie Cochran meets Geoffrey Fieger. There's nothing that he can say that won't cost him whatever he has in the bank.